Up, Down, Side-ways?

Today Wednesday 1st of June, the ABS released its "Australian National Accounts: National Income, Expenditure and Product, Mar 2011" report (cat. Number 5206.0), from where the following chart was extracted:

GDP, Percentage changes - Volume measures

"In seasonally adjusted terms, GDP decreased 1.2% in the March quarter, through the year GDP growth was 1.0%.
"On the expenditure side, the decline this quarter (in seasonally adjusted volume terms) was driven by Net exports (detracting 2.4 percentage points) and Changes in inventories (detracting 0.5 percentage points). Partially offsetting these falls were Private gross fixed capital formation (adding 0.7 percentage points), Household final consumption expenditure (adding 0.3 percentage points) and Government final consumption expenditure (adding 0.2 percentage points)."

The results were better than Goldman Sachs had expected yesterday:

"Investment bank Goldman Sachs predicted Australia's economy will have shrunk by as much as 2 per cent in the first quarter of the year, a big turnaround from the 0.7 per cent expansion in the final quarter of last year." (See here)

Other comments by observers:

"After today's negative GDP figure for the March quarter, and the recent spate of bad news and economic statistics pouring out, it isn't a big leap for Australia's so-called miracle economy to be staring down the barrel of a technical recession in the June quarter." (See here)

My comment: possible, but perhaps too pessimistic.

"Australia's economy has suffered its biggest quarterly contraction since the recession of the early 1990s." (See here)

My comment: see the chart above, for seasonally adjusted (light gray broken line).

And then, we find this:

"The domestic economy grew very strongly in Q1
"Well, for all the whinging and whining! (...) Today's GDP numbers show precisely why the RBA should have hiked in May, or if not May, in June. The more likely outcome is July. Here is Paul Bloxham's (HSBC) summary:
" 'If it weren't for the headline GDP number being severely hit by a sharp fall in coal exports, today's numbers would be universally judged as strong.'" (See here)

My comment: You be the judge.